by Faun Rice
policies that often completely contradicted the king’s; a royal order to turn over
rebels might simply be refused (Lorenz 1997). On the other hand, accounts of
arbitrary executions at whim within the king’s “Great Village,” or of retainers
willingly offering themselves up for sacrifice at the death of a member of the
royal family, do not appear to be fabricated. George Milne is probably right to
speak of the French being overawed by the spectacle of an elaborate Mississip-
pian “monarchical theatre” (2015: 37); much of what happened in the Great
Village did have a theatrical quality—except, of course, it was the kind of thea-
tre where, if a character died, they actually did die.
As a result, the royal village grew smaller and smaller:
The great Village of the Natchez is at present reduced to a very few Cabins. The
Reason which I heard for this is that the Savages, from whom the Great Chief
has the Right to take all they have, get as far away from him as they can; and
therefore, many Villages of this Nation have been formed at some Distance from
this. (Charlevoix 1763: 312)
This might help explain the contradiction between reports of extreme obeisance,
and the royals’ reluctance to use the term “Stinkard” in commoners’ presence.
Foreign observers almost never got outside the Great Village, a place largely
22. But, of course, so was that of Louis XIV.
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
395
reduced to Suns, Nobles, and their servants. The only commoners they were
likely to encounter were the royals’ own wives and husbands, or the visiting del-
egations that would periodically appear to offer contributions of choice meats
and delicacies—neither of whom it would have been wise for the Suns to gra-
tuitously humiliate.
Archaeology confirms that not only were the other settlements larger than
the “Grand Village,” they were actually wealthier (Lorenz 1997: 106–8; 2000:
168–72). What’s more, relations between center and periphery often seem to
have taken the form of ritualized hostility. On the one hand, we are told that
“relatives of the Sun regard the other savages as dirt” (Swanton 1911: 100); on the
other, we find descriptions of how the common people, in their role of warriors,
would every year pretend to ambush, capture, and prepare to kil the king, until a
second mock war party intervened to rescue him (Du Pratz 1774: 319–20). Af-
terward, those same warriors would combine to cultivate a special field of maize
whose harvest the female Suns would subsequently mimic stealing.23
What sort of power, then, did the Great Sun have? And how do we char-
acterize such a polity? Most contemporary literature is of little help here. Even
those who see the French accounts as largely a projection of their own ab-
solutism are content, insofar as they take on the question at all, to fall back
on the evolutionist language favored by most contemporary archaeologists and
describe it as a “complex chiefdom” (Lorenz 1997; Milne 2015: 6, 10)—which
doesn’t really tell you much other than that they think the Natchez should be
considered one notch lower than a state. Not only is this unedifying, it tends to
obscure the key feature of arrangements like the Shilluk, or Natchez, or even for
most of its history the Merina kingdom: that the question of the king’s sover-
eign power (i.e., his absolute ability to impose his will in any way he wished to
23. The mock battle was ostensibly a reenactment of a historical event when the Great
Sun actually was nearly captured by an enemy war party, but it’s hard to read it as
anything but a reminder of how much his life is ultimately in his warriors’ hands.
Du Pratz provides a description of two feasts; this one, and a harvest festival, of
which we have several other accounts as well (compiled in Swanton 1911: 113–23).
The first feast, in March, corresponded to the equinox, and maize planting, and
the ultimate victory of the white-plumed warriors of the Great Sun over the red-
plumed “enemy” warriors led by the war leader, the Tattooed Serpent, no doubt also
implied a transition to the half of the year marked by agricultural activity. Warriors
then go on to plant and tend the special field for the king, which is harvested in July,
and female Suns pretend to run away with the crop. For present purposes, though,
I only wish to stress the element of ritualized hostility.
396
ON KINGS
when he was physically present) and the question of his political power (i.e., his
ability to influence events when he was not physically present) are completely
separate. The first, kings’ ability to place themselves beyond and outside the laws
which they uphold, was always absolute in principle (however much it might
not be in practice).24 If a king cannot, at least in theory, kill his subjects without
reason, he can hardly be said to be a king at all. But it is notoriously difficult
for monarchs to wield such power in situations where they are not physically
there.25 The Great Sun, then, seems to have been in a situation quite similar to
the Shilluk reth: largely confined to a peculiarly constituted village largely con-
sisting of his wives and attendants (and in his case, his brother and sisters and
their spouses and attendants), presumably along with the motley assortment
of criminals, orphans, and runaways who ordinarily collect around such courts,
inside which his whim was law, outside which his ability to control the course of
events was almost entirely dependent on his guile and political savvy.
The Great Sun’s capacity to bring health, prosperity, and fertility to his peo-
ple, on the other hand, was entirely independent of that political influence. In
fact, there is even some reason to believe it might have been seen as dependent
on its containment. According to one account, the secret holy of holies within
the Great Temple was not the eternal fire, but a stone image which was consid-
ered to be the petrified body of the original lawgiver. Apparently that original
Sun who had “formerly been sent to this place to be the master of the earth,
had become so terrible that he made men die merely by his look; [so] in order
to prevent it he had a cabin made for himself into which he entered and had
himself made into a stone statue” (St. Cosme, in Swanton 1911: 172; 1946:
779), a secret which was known only to the Suns and their closest confidants. In
24. It is surely significant, for example, that the laws Du Pratz was told were conveyed
by the founder of the kingdom—“we must never kill anyone but in defense of our
own lives; we must never know any other woman besides our own; we must never
take anything that belongs to another” (1774: 314)—seem precisely those most
likely to be ignored by the Great Sun and his close relatives. I should emphasize
that in reality, no one ever really has absolute power in this sense: there are always
lines one cannot cross, at least without eventually being destroyed for it. But kings
quite regularly insist that they do, in principle, have this power anyway.
25. Even Tudor kings had trouble with this: their power was so caught up with their
&
nbsp; physical being that in order to get subjects to accept delegated authority they often
had to rely on members of court who were known to be in the most intimate
possible physical contact, such as the famous Groom of the Stool of Henry VIII
(Starkey 1977).
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
397
Government by metahuman beings
[Sovereignty contained in time]
[Sovereignty contained in space]
Ritual clown police
Divine kingship
Seasonal clown police
Extreme Frazerian
Successful assertion
sacred kingship
of sovereignty
Seasonal police
“The state”
Figure 1. The “declownification” of sovereignty.
other words, the Great Sun, who regularly interceded with his ancestors in the
Temple to bring the powers of life to his people, also kept the potential deadly
powers of those ancestors contained in precisely the way that his people sought
to contain his own deadly powers. Again, much as among Shilluk, the divisions
between heaven and earth were maintained, however tenuously, by the mainte-
nance on every level of at least potential hostility.
* * *
While the Natchez situation might at first seem a far cry from the kind of
careful circumscription of police powers we saw in California, the Northwest
Coast, and societies of the Plains, on another level, all of these can be seen as
structural variations on a single principle. In every case, sovereign power—the
power to violate the terms of the ordinary moral order, to create rules, give
unquestionable, unaccountable orders backed up by threat of punishment—is
held by humans only insofar as it is an embodiment, extension, refraction, or
delegate of metahuman beings. In each case, too, the contexts in which such
power can be exercised are carefully defined, and—since marking something off
398
ON KINGS
as sacred is always a way of creating, preserving, or maintaining its power—this
circumscription itself plays a role in generating the power of which sovereignty
is a practical expression.
Seen this way, the difference between the Kwakiutl and the Théoloël is per-
fectly straightforward. The Kwakiutl contain divine sovereignty in time, giving
the Fools police powers during the ritual season, but not otherwise. The Théoloël,
in contrast, contain divine sovereignty in space, limiting it to the theatrical arena
of the Great Village and the area immediately surrounding the physical body
of the king. If the Plains societies’ seasonal police represent a partial seculariza-
tion of the first, then more familiar forms of kingship might equally be said to
be a partial secularization of the second. Yet this secularization is always partial.
Kings are always sacred, even when they are not in any sense divine.
ON THE CONSTITUTIVE WAR BETWEEN KING AND PEOPLE
The sovereign is not bound by the laws.
Ulpian
Government is civil war.
Anselme Bellegarrigue
In “The divine kingship of the Shil uk” (chapter 2 in this volume), I suggested
that monarchies—and, by extension, modern states—are marked by a kind of
primordial, constitutive war between king and people, one that is prior, even, to
Carl Schmitt’s purportedly foundational distinction between friend and enemy. It
is constitutive in the sense that it is through this (antagonistic) relation that both
king and people can be said to come into being to begin with. This is why even
when a kingdom is founded on purely voluntary arrangements (as many do ap-
pear to be), it is nonetheless framed as conquest, or even, as Marshall Sahlins ob-
serves (chapter 3), the mutual conquest (“encompassment’) of king and people.26
In stranger-kingship, one might say that the “social peace,” the truce in that
war that makes stable kingdoms possible, takes the form of those diarchical
26. It is worth recal ing that immediately after the passage when the Israelites tel Samuel
they wish to have a king “like other people,” the prophet warns them, prophetically,
that they’ll soon come to see their relation as adversarial (Samuel 8: 11–19).
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
399
arrangements so beautiful y described in Sahlins’ essays on the BaKongo and
Mexica in this volume (chapters 3 and 4, respectively). In these, royal control
over the lives of subjects is typical y matched by popular control over the land
and its products, with the indigenous people represented by earth priests or
other autochthonous authorities with ritual power over the soil. Stil , I think
the idiom of war between king and people draws on and is expressive of an
even deeper structural reality—the ability to step outside the moral order so as
to partake of the kind of power capable of creating such an order is always by
definition an act of violence, and can only be maintained as such. Transgression
is not in itself necessarily a violent act. The kind of transgression that becomes
the basis for a power of command over others necessarily must be. It is a form
of compulsion that lies behind any possible accountability. This is also the deep
truth about the modern state whose disturbing implications Schmitt ([1922]
2005)—the German jurist credited with creating the legal basis for the Nazi
concentration camps—was perhaps the first to work out in a systematic fash-
ion. To say a state is “sovereign” is ultimately to define its highest authorities
as beyond moral accountability. This not just war; it is total war. Insofar as the
sovereign intends to apply such compulsion to an entire population within
a given territory, it ultimately must always be. (The only limitation on such
total war is that the sovereign cannot wipe out the entire population, or his
sovereignty would itself cease to exist.) Hence, as I remarked at the end of the
Shil uk essay, the tendency for modern states to frame their greatest projects in
terms of some sort of unwinnable war: the war on poverty, crime, drugs, terror,
and so forth.
Sometimes, this structural conflict can become explicit: Simon Simonse’s
(1992: 204; 2005: 84) memorable image of the rainmaker king, armed with
a rifle, single-handedly defending himself against his outraged subjects be-
ing only one dramatic case in point. History is full of occasions when things
actual y did come down to weapons: massacres, insurrections, mutinies, and
reigns of terror. There is always a continuum, too, between rites of rebel ion,
actual rebel ions, and outright revolutions; as we have come to learn (e.g., Berce
1976), almost any of these things can unexpectedly flip into any of the others.
I’m hardly saying anything new here. Al this has been endlessly debated and
discussed by historians for many years; but once again, the perspectives and
materials assembled in this volume suggest that war is by no means the only
way that the structural conflict can work itself out. And even when it does,
armed conflict, even between nations, always involves rules, and one might say
400
ON KINGS
(as I have ar
gued for unarmed street actions: Graeber 2007c, 2009) that in any
war, there are always two levels of conflict: within the frame (in which each
party tries to win), and about the frame (in which they argue about the rules
of engagement; ultimately, about what winning even means). Here, sovereignty
is, again, one of those points where such frames implode; where the two levels
col apse into one another. When a divine king breaks the rules of conventional
morality, marries his sister or massacres his brothers, this is never just a political
move (though it might also be a savvy political move), it is always simultane-
ously a metapolitical move, a way of shifting the frame of reference upward to
a level where it is possible to rule over—and hence fight over—the nature of
the rules themselves.
I understand this might seem confusing. My distinction between divine and
sacred kingship is actually meant to provide a way to navigate this often vexed
territory. So clarification might be helpful. In proposing that we apply the term
“divine kings” to monarchs who act like gods—that is, with arbitrariness and
impunity—rather than those who are actually considered to “be” gods, I am in
no way suggesting that kings are never considered to be gods (as we’ll see, some
certainly are), or even that, historically, the attribution of divine status, when it
does occur, must be considered some sort of secondary elaboration on certain
forms of practice. I do think Hocart was basically right to say royal powers were
ultimately modeled on and seen to be derived from those of gods; even if I think
the devolution was likely to have proceeded in a far more circuitous fashion than
he would likely have imagined.
So that’s what I’m not saying. What I am saying is this: if you look at the lit-
erature on divine kingship as we know it from the anthropological record— that
is, for roughly the last five hundred years—what is really striking is the degree
to which there is no systematic relation between the theology of kingship—that
is, the degree to which a monarch is or is not considered to be a god (or the
avatar or incarnation of a god, or priest, prophet, or earthly representative of a
god, etc.)—and the degree to which they behave like one. Let us compare the
Shilluk reth and Ganda kabaka in this context. The reth is explicitly considered